A Clogged Drain

For the last several months my bathroom sink has been draining rather slowly. Sometimes I would get really annoyed by it and dump some Drain-o down it but it didn’t seem to help much. For the most part, I just lived with the annoyance–until the day I came across this product on clearance:

Normally, I’d walk right by such a thing because I don’t really buy into the “as seen on TV” hype. But this was on clearance. Surprisingly enough, it worked. Within five minutes, the drain was completely clear and water was draining out of the sink almost as fast as it was coming out of the spout.

That drain can be a lot like our spiritual lives. I was annoyed that it was draining so slowly–there was an obvious problem but I didn’t do much to fix it unless I was really annoyed. When my attempts to throw a quick fix at it didn’t work, I just went back to living with a clogged drain–feeling annoyed by it all over again. I worked around the problem by only turning on the faucet for a short period of time so as not to have the sink fill up with too much water too quickly. This slowed down the process of washing my face and brushing my teeth. Annoying? Yes. But I persisted in not doing much of anything about it.

There are so many times I am aware of an area of my spiritual life that needs attention–a place that is clogged up, if you will–but I don’t do much to take care of it. Instead, I throw a quick fix at it in the hopes that it will work and when it doesn’t, I’m annoyed–but not enough to pursue some real solution.

The Turbo Snake seemed like a rather unlikely solution to my problem. I took a chance on it and it happened to work out. This isn’t always the case (especially with As Seen on TV products!). The point here isn’t that the product promised a quick solution or that it was inexpensive. The point is that I realized after it worked how much of an annoyance living with the clogged drain had been. It’s sort of like you don’t know how much pain you are in from an injury until you don’t have the pain anymore. The comparison between the two becomes more distinct.

Unfortunately, it is easy to adapt to clogged up spiritual lives. It’s easy to move through the day with strategies in place to deal with the annoyance. Yet, the consequence grows greater and greater with each passing day as we deny God the opportunity to clean out the junk in our hearts. Turning to God certainly isn’t a quick fix but it’s also not a shot in the dark Turbo Snake move either. Spiritual growth is a process and God is in it for the long haul with us. He is an ever present help in time of need. Let us not persist in annoyance but instead, embrace the God who can clean out the clogged drains in our lives. Indeed, He makes all things new!